I’ve read a few classics on celestial navigation. The Greeks, for instance, had the *Aristarchus* star map that tied the asterisms to sea routes, and the *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* mentions using the Pleiades and Sirius as markers. In the East, Chinese astronomers like Liu Xin catalogued constellations in the *Treatise on Astrology of the Sun’s Discernment*, and they used the Milky Way’s bend as a directional guide. Polynesians, though not written, had oral star navigation that reliably steered them across the Pacific. All of these point to a real, systematic use of stars that could fit into your Iliad geometry.

That sounds like a fascinating exercise. I’d start by cataloguing the key locations in the text—Trojan camp, Athenian lines, key battle points—and then overlay them on a modern star map to see if any pattern emerges. Using software that can transform geographic coordinates into celestial ones, you could test whether those lines line up with the Pleiades or a Milky Way arc. Just remember to keep a critical eye: poetic language can be flexible, and a coincidence might look like a pattern. If the math lines up, that’s a solid lead; if not, it’s still a neat way to explore how myth and astronomy intersect.

I’ll pull the coordinates of the key points—Trojan camp, Athenian lines, the bridge at Thebes—and plot them in a 3D star chart. Then I’ll project that onto the night sky as seen from the relevant latitudes in the first millennium BCE. I’ll check if the resulting lines intersect the Pleiades, Orion’s belt, or the Milky Way’s curvature. If the geometry aligns, we can talk about a “stellar epic”; if it doesn’t, we’ll still have a neat map to display. Either way, let’s keep the data tidy and the story flowing.